"Spiritually, I consider myself a Latin," wrote Mayor deLesseps S. "Chep" Morrison in Latin
American Mission, and perhaps no other New Orleans mayor worked harder or more successfully to increase trade
and good will between New Orleans and Latin America. Early in his administration he established a department of
International Relations designed to work closely with foreign political leaders and business representatives and with the
leaders of International House and the International Trade Mart. "I was forever selling Louisiana--and the United
States--to my Latin American friends," he wrote, "and selling Latin America, its needs, its potentialities, to my own
country." During his terms of office, he presided over a "golden age" of international trade promotion, which saw the
establishment of the International Trade Mart, a dramatic increase in Latin American trade through the Port of New
Orleans, and the inauguration of new commercial air passenger and freight routes between New Orleans and Latin
American cities. During the late 1940s and throughout the 1950s, New Orleans--and Chep Morrison himself--earned an
international reputation for progressive trade promotion. Morrison's personal efforts were rewarded in 1961 when
President John F. Kennedy appointed him U.S. ambassador to the Organization of American States.

This photograph was taken on January 13, 1946 (just nine days before Chep Morrison's upset victory over Mayor
Robert S. Maestri) at a cocktail party given by International House on the occasion of the dedication of Moisant
International Airport. Pictured (from left to right, seated) are Hector Chacon, Minister of Communications for
Guatemala; Wilbur, L. Morrison, Vice-President in charge of Pan-American Airways' Latin American Division; Luis
Garcia Cadena, Minister of Communications from Colombia; and Carlos Martinez Aparicio, publisher of La Prensa at
Barranquilla (Colombia). The men on the back row are all New Orleanians who played critical roles in the Morrison
effort to make the Crescent City the "gateway to the Americas": General Allison Owen, Philup H. Lamber [sic],
deLesseps S. Morrison, William G. Zetzmann, Charles Nutter, and Mario Bermudez.

But I had the advantage of a unique experience in New Orleans, where for nearly fifteen years I had
conducted a kind of private Latin American foreign service of my own. For New Orleans, commerce with Latin
America was all-important. Our port competed directly with New York and Miami. During World War II, it had been
second to New York. When I was elected mayor in 1946, a year after the end of World War II, I discovered we had
dropped from second to seventeenth place. With the backing and stimulation of civic leaders in New Orleans, I
determined to make the New Orleans port as busy in peacetime as it had been in wartime, and second again only to New
York.

We launched an international-trade development program, in which I headed delegations of forty-five to eighty persons
on sixty different trips to Latin America.